Google+ Project: It’s Social, It’s Bold, It’s Fun, And It Looks Good — Now For The Hard Part

Last night, you may have heard talk of a mysterious black bar appearing on the top of Google.com. Or you may have even seen it yourself. No, you weren’t hallucinating. It was a sign of something about to show itself. Something big. Google+.

What is Google+? It’s the super top-secret social project that Google has been working on for the past year. You know, the one being led by General Patton (Vic Gundotra) and General MacArthur (Bradley Horowitz). Yes, the one Google has tried to downplay as much as humanly possible — even as we got leak after leak after leak of what they were working on. Yes, the one they weren’t going to make a big deal about with pomp and circumstance. It’s real. And it’s here.

Sort of.

You see, the truth is that Google really is trying not to make a huge deal out of Google+. That’s not because they don’t have high hopes for it. Or because they don’t think it’s any good. Instead, it’s because what they’re comfortable showing off right now is just step one of a much bigger picture. When I sat down with Gundotra and Horowitz last week, they made this point very clear. In their minds, Google+ is more than a social product, or even a social strategy, it’s an extension of Google itself. Hence, Google+.

How’s that for downplaying it?

“We believe online sharing is broken. And even awkward,” Gundotra says. “We think connecting with other people is a basic human need. We do it all the time in real life, but our online tools are rigid. They force us into buckets — or into being completely public,” he continues. “Real life sharing is nuanced and rich. It has been hard to get that into software,” is the last thing he says before diving into a demo of Google+.

What he proceeds to show me is a product that in many ways is so well designed that it doesn’t really even look like a Google product. When I tell Gundotra and Horowitz this, they laugh. “Thank you,” Gundotra says very enthusiastically. Clearly, they’ve put a lot of work into both the UI and UX of Google+.

MG Siegler

Within Temptation - Sinéad (Official Music Video)

4$ Billion Income from Movie Delivery over the Web !

A new trend in delivering Movies and Videos over the internet has just bypassed Cable and Satellite operators. Usually, a consumer will look for an easy set-up boxes, or enjoy a longstanding service relationships and "bundled" cost hooks at home. However, this dominance is no more the only way for users, since now there is a rising wave of video creators, aggregators and distributors using the Internet to bypass incumbent PayTV control points and deliver video programming enabling the delivery of web video directly to consumers.
MZ

.. EVERYBODY LIES

GazoPa to Shut down ! [Announcement to its users]

Dear GazoPa Users

Thank you for using GazoPa services. GazoPa.com started at TechCrunch50 in September 2008 and has grown to more than 90,000 unique users per month. However, we have decided to put our time and efforts to BtoB business and have discontinued our BtoC services on June, 2011. We have received lots of inquiries from all over the world and decided to focus on BtoB market especially in China where e-commerce grows dramatically.

When we started our service in 2008, some people were skeptical about our activity. But Since then, the number of images and videos on the internet are increasing and the demand to a navigation tool is growing as well. Considering inquiries that reach to us, we believe similar image search engine would be becoming must-have tool in various kinds of fields. Due to our limited resources, we have had to make the hard decision to shut down our BtoC sites and decided to focus on BtoB market. 

We'll be launching a new image search site mainly for research purpose in near future as an alternative tool for our current users. 

If you have any questions, please email contact@gazopa.com 

One again, thank you all for your support over the years. 

Sincerely, 
The GazoPa team 


eコマース等サイトへの類似画像検索導入につきご関心のある方はこちらまでお気軽にお問合せ下さい。
日本で対応いたします。contact@gazopa.com 

如果您想寻求业务合作，请与我们联系contact@gazopa.com 

Internet Security ..

US runs secret Net, gives dissidents a voice

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet. The US effort, revealed in dozens of interviews and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.

Google says hackers in China stole Gmail passwords

Google said Wednesday that hackers in China had compromised the personal e-mail accounts of hundreds of users of Google's Gmail service, including top U.S. and Asian government officials, Chinese political activists, military personnel and journalists, BBC News reported.

In a blog post, the company said that its security had not been breached, but that some users of Gmail had been the targets of a campaign aimed at stealing passwords and monitoring e-mail accounts, according to the New York Times.

Google said in the blog post that the campaign appeared to originate from the city of Jinan, China, and that it had affected the personal Gmail accounts of users including “senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists.”

The so-called phishing campaign worked by sending the victims spoofed e-mails, often from accounts that appeared to belong to co-workers, family or friends. Those emails contained links to spoofed Gmail sites, which harvested the usernames and passwords of anyone who used them, Forbes explained. The hackers used those login details to forward any mail coming into the account to a third party, or in some cases gathered information about contacts to use in other phishing scams.

It is the second time that Google has implicated China in an intrusion, the New York Times said. Last year, the company said it had traced an attack on its systems to perpetrators based in China. The accusation led to a rupture of Google’s relationship with China and a decision by the company not to cooperate with Chinese censorship demands on its search engine.

Google said in the official blog post that it had detected and disrupted the campaign, notified the victims and secured their accounts. Google recommended that Gmail users take additional security steps, including adding a Google service known as two-step verification, which involves using a cell phone.

Source: NEWYORK TIMES

Bug in Minesweeper ?!!

Two Ultraheavy Elements Added to Periodic Table

By Mark Brown, Wired UK


A committee of international chemists and physicists has officially added two new elements to the periodic table: the ultraweighty elements 114 and 116.They’re the heaviest members yet of the periodic table, with whopping atomic weights of 289 and 292 atomic mass units respectively. The previous heavyweight winners were copernicium (285) and roentgenium (272). The two new elements are radioactive and only exist for less than a second before decaying into lighter atoms. Element 116 will quickly decay into 114, and 114 transforms into the slightly lighter copernicium as it sheds its alpha particles.

Evidence for the two elements has been mounting for years. In 1999, for example, Russian physicists bombarded plutonium-244 with calcium-48 to produce a single atom of rapidly decaying 114.

After the discovery of 116 in 2000, a decade of further experimentation and a three-year review process, the new elements were given official status by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics on June 1.

“Element 114″ obviously isn’t a very catchy name, especially in a sea of molybdenums and seaborgiums. They have temporary titles — ununquadium and ununhexium — but final names are yet to been decided.

The discoverers at Dubna, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, in Russia have proposed the name flerovium for 114, after Soviet element-finder Georgy Flyorov, and moscovium for 116, after Russia’s Moscow region.

The committee also heard arguments for elements 113, 115 and 118. They concluded that the results were encouraging, but don’t quite fulfill the criteria for new elements just yet. The temporarily titled ununtrium, ununpentium and ununoctium, which can weigh as much as 294 atomic mass units, will have to try again in a few years.

Source: Wired.co.uk

The True stories behind the Facebook movie and books ..

How does Mark Zuckerberg feel about the Facebook movie?
Mark revealed his opinion of The Social Network movie and the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich on which the film was based by saying, "The reason why we didn't participate is because it was very clear that it was fiction from the beginning. We talked to [Mezrich] about that and he basically told us, 'what I'm most interested in is telling the most interesting story.' We want to make sure that we never participate in something like that, so then someone can take something that's really fictional and say, 'We talked to Mark Zuckerberg for this.' So, I think it's clear that it's fiction. All the book reviews of that book from people who know it say that it's fiction. The movie is based on the book. I don't really know how much else there is to say about it.” - Computer History Museum Mark Zuckerberg Interview 


Contrarily, Mark feels that the book The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick is more in line with the Facebook true story, “You know, honestly, I wish that when people tried to do journalism or write stuff about Facebook that they at least tried to get it right. So, I mean that's why having not read all of your book (speaking to author David Kirkpatrick), and I read a part of it when you sent it to me, I at least appreciate the effort that you put in, in terms of spending all those hours and days talking to dozens of people in the ecosystem around us, at least trying to understand what's going on. If I read your book, I probably wouldn't agree with everything, but at least there's the sense that it's serious journalism.” - Computer History Museum Mark Zuckerberg Interview


How much money did Eduardo Saverin invest in Facebook?
Saverin’s original investment to help start the company was $1,000. Zuckerberg himself also contributed $1,000. Soon after, they both agreed to invest an additional $10,000 each to cover the quickly growing server costs. A few months later, Eduardo opened a bank account to cover business expenses and to deposit advertising revenues, at which point he added an additional $10,000 of his own money. - The Facebook Effect


What was the original pay agreement regarding Facebook?
The first agreement made was a 70 – 30 split between Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin. About a month after Thefacebook was released to Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate Dustin Moskovitz asked to work on the project as well. He was given 5%, reducing Mark’s cut to 65%. When Sean Parker entered the picture, the company was reincorporated and new corporate bylaws were written up. As a result, Zuckerberg was entitled to 51%, Saverin 34.4%, Moskovitz 6.81% and Parker 6.47%, with the remaining allotted to their law firm. - The Facebook Effect

Did Eduardo Saverin really freeze the Facebook bank account?
Yes. In researching the real story behind the Facebook movie The Social Network, it was discovered that Saverin did in fact freeze the bank account he had set up to pay the business expenses. Zuckerberg was forced to pay for the Palo Alto house expenses, the site’s running costs and new servers out of pocket. - The Facebook Effect


Who sings the The Social Network trailer song?

The Social Network trailer music is a cover of the song "Creep", origninally recorded by the band Radiohead. The Social Network's Creep cover is sung by Scala & Kolacny Brothers, which is actually a Belgian girls' choir. The classically trained Kolacny brothers lead the choir, with Stijn Kolacny conducting and Steven Kolacny on piano. The choir has turned into an international sensation, as the result of both creating their own music and performing stellar covers of Radiohead, U2, Rammstein, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nirvana, to name a few. The Social Network Creep song heard in the movie's trailer is available on Amazon UK.

Visual Art By R. Blair

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